Conservative activist Robby Starbuck has launched a $15 million defamation lawsuit against tech giant Google, accusing its AI tools such as Bard, Gemini, and Gemma of spreading “outrageously false” claims that paint him as a criminal. Filed in Delaware Superior Court, the suit alleges Google’s AI falsely accused Starbuck of heinous acts, including sexual assault, rape, harassment, stalking, drug charges, resisting arrest, murder, and even ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s illicit activities. These smears, Starbuck claims, reached an estimated 2.8 million users, threatening his reputation and safety.
Starbuck, a vocal critic of woke corporate policies, said he sent cease-and-desist letters to Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, demanding action. Yet, the defamatory outputs continued, amplifying concerns in light of a recent assassination attempt on conservative figure Charlie Kirk. Starbuck argues the false claims could incite violence against him, citing the volatile political climate.
“If you know me personally, then of course you know that none of these articles or claims are true … I certainly wasn’t accused of murder in 1991 when I was two years old. But if you aren’t familiar with my full biography or my age, then you’d have no reason to doubt anything Google’s AI was saying,” Starbuck said in a statement. “So what’s happening here is that Google went out of its way to fabricate an entire story to damage my reputation and then fraudulently invented fake mainstream news stories as validation for Google’s lies.”
The lawsuit accuses Google of negligence and malice, alleging its AI was deliberately engineered to target conservative voices. Starbuck’s legal team contends the tech giant failed to address known flaws in its large language models (LLMs), allowing harmful fabrications to spread unchecked.
“This case underscores the unprecedented danger posed when a trillion-dollar corporation deploys AI tools capable of destroying reputations in seconds and then refuses to take responsibility for the damage,” said Krista Baughman, a partner at the Dhillon Law Group that is representing Starbuck. “Free expression does not give license to fabricate criminal accusations about private citizens. AI companies must be held to the same standards of truth and accountability as any other publisher.”
Google dismissed Starbuck’s claims, attributing the issues to “hallucinations,”which is a common problem in early AI models now purportedly resolved. The tech giant claimed it cannot replicate the alleged outputs in its current AI products and suggests creative user prompting may have triggered the errors.
This isn’t Starbuck’s first battle against Big Tech. In August, Starbuck settled a similar defamation suit against Meta and now advises the company on AI bias policies.
“Both parties have resolved this matter to our mutual satisfaction. Since engaging on these important issues with Robby, Meta has made tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias. Building on that work, Meta and Robby Starbuck will work collaboratively in the coming months to continue to find ways to address issues of ideological and political bias and minimize the risk that the model returns hallucinations in response to user queries,” Meta and Starbuck said in a joint statement obtained by Fox News.
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